Point of Know Return
PRISM‘s science and technology are the result of creative pull. Its features and functionality arose to serve artistic goals. While its efficacy reflects commercial enterprise, its philosophy reflects creative practice. Dive deeper into PRISM‘s ideas, and explore how its reimagines music production.
Revealing Performances
Clearly Articulated
PRISM can extract the individual articulations in a performance, and assign them individually to an audio track or virtual instrument. Doing this requires PRISM to synthesise the portions of notes that were never recorded. In PRISM terminology, this is called Theoretical Audio.
Year: 2020Â Marco Minnemann: Drums
Optimal Illusions
For any note created on an instrument, there are an infinite number of possible recordings that we would hear as accurate. PRISM asks the question, “On a given recording, why not replace the recorded notes with more optimal versions?”
PRISM creates an auditory illusion. It preserves our perception of the original sounds, while improving the definition of timbre and clarity of performance.
It's About Time
With MIDI, a note begins when the sound starts. But our brains often perceive notes as beginning later. In the cases like brass and legato strings…much later.
As a result, when we edit MIDI in a DAW MIDI using the timeline, it’s usually late (by different amounts on each track). So the performance we create isn’t what’s on the screen—or the correct result of quantising and groove-templating. But because the effect is often unconscious, we may not notice that our results are compromised.
Note timing begins with the note's energy.
Timing begins when we perceive it.
PRISM times its events based on perceptual note onset—so sounds begin playing slightly before the DAW’s time-stamp. Instead, the time-stamp never refers to (and references, in the piano roll editor and tempo operations), when we perceive the sound to start.
As a result, PRISM reproduces the entire sound of acoustic recordings, and creates the edited performances we intend.